5 tips to help you prepare for the new California Consumer Privacy Act

Data privacy continues to be top-of-mind for businesses. For example, nearly one-third of global enterprises view compliance with new privacy laws, like the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as one of the biggest IT hurdles that their organizations face1.

The arrival of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) will impact many large businesses with customers who reside in California. With more than 39 million individuals residing in California2 and transacting with businesses worldwide, the scope of the CCPA is significant. Businesses around the world need to start formulating a compliance strategy now so they are well prepared when enforcement begins in January 2020.

Today, we want to share five tips that can help your organization to get ready for new privacy regulations such as CCPA with Microsoft 365:

Tip 1: Leverage the GDPR assessment in Compliance Manager

With many commonalities between GDPR and CCPA, such as data subject rights of access, erasure, and portability, organizations can leverage their GDPR program to start tackling CCPA compliance now.

To help businesses assess Microsoft cloud services and find applicable technology solutions to implement GDPR controls, we released Compliance Manager in 2018. Compliance Manager is a cloud-based tool that gives you step-by-step guidance to help you implement, track and record your data-protection controls. You can get started by using the GDPR assessment in Compliance Manager today.

According to a blog post by Julie Brill, U.S consumers are highly aware of their privacy rights with the highest engagement of approximately 2 million users signing into the Microsoft privacy dashboard to manage their information in 4 months since GDPR came into effect. With that in mind, we encourage you to start building out your data subject access requests process today, because CCPA requires a 12-month look-back period.

To get ready to respond to this high demand of data access requests, we encourage you to start using the Data Subject Requests (DSRs) tool in the new Microsoft 365 compliance center, which allows your privacy and compliance teams to respond more efficiently to DSRs in a timely manner.

Tip 3: Discover, classify & label, and protect sensitive data

The CCPA will impose penalties for data breaches of consumers’ personal information. As organizations live in a world with a tsunami of data across their digital estate, understanding where their most sensitive data is and how to protect it is critical to reduce compliance risks.

Microsoft Information Protection harnesses an integrated and intelligent approach to target the 80 percent of corporate data that is estimated to be “dark” or un-classified and unprotected3. You can start to make use of the U.S. PII sensitive data types to automatically discover, classify, and protect personal data to help you with CCPA compliance.

Tip 4: Use encryption to protect and control your sensitive emails

Regulations like GDPR and CCPA see encryption as an effective method to protect personal information from unauthorized parties in the event of a data breach.

Office 365 Message Encryption enables users to protect sensitive emails shared with anyone inside and outside of your organization. If your tenant is eligible, Office 365 Message Encryption will be on by default. You can get started by setting up a Data Loss Prevention policy that applies Office 365 Message Encryption to U.S. PII sensitive data types.

Also start educating your end users to apply protection such as “do not forward” or “encrypt-only” directly from Outlook (either desktop or web version). Watch this video to learn more.

While the CCPA brings prominent challenges to many businesses who were not subject to GDPR, we encourage those organizations to view CCPA and other privacy laws as an opportunity to enhance their privacy programs and embrace privacy as a corporate value to build trust with customers.

Check out the “Championing privacy rights to drive differentiation” webcast with Microsoft CIO Kurt DelBene, CISO Bret Arsenault, and a featured speaker, Enza Iannopollo of Forrester, who discuss the new era of privacy expectations and how to invest in privacy as a business driver.

Learn more about the Microsoft cloud

At Microsoft, we are committed to partnering with you to keep advancing our solutions to help you protect your digital estate in a more compliant manner. Here are some additional resources to help you in your ongoing compliance journey:

Download our e-book to learn more about how to protect digital privacy.